Dear Brothers and Sisters,
It is ‘for’ freedom that Christ has set us free. So that you are no longer a slave to your self or to others, you are self-possessed, and in the face of difficulties you are at peace. You are free to say really what you think. Jesus died so that we could have this freedom. Edith Stein and her sister Rosa when they were arrested by the Gestapo in retaliation for what the bishops of Holland said against Hitler, she said to her sister as they were leaving the monastery, ‘Let us go and be with our people.’ She knew they would soon be dead.
Jesus Christ gives you and me a freedom, not to do whatever we want, but a freedom for others, a freedom not to sin; a freedom to give our lives away, for others. Would you like to live in this way? We see two examples of it in the readings today.
In the first reading Elisha freely gives up his oxen to follow the call of being a prophet and receives the cloak of Elijah (1 King 19:16, 19-21). Elisha is a rich man with twelve oxen and he sacrifices all of them, shares the food with his neighbors, and destroys his farming equipment. He renounces his former life and takes up the cloak of Elijah. This is very different from the one whose profession of faith is merely external; it does not change his/her life.
In the gospel (Luke 9: 51-62) Jesus in rejected in Samaria and the sons of thunder, James and John, want to rain down fire on the people. Jesus rebukes them. When a disciple tells Jesus he will follow him anywhere, Jesus responds literally and says that the Son of Man does not have where to lay his head. There is no place for him. Christ promises himself to this man, but he promises nothing else. He is asking, can you follow me, but only me? I have nothing to give you except for me.
The measure of Jesus’ authority is his poverty, his inability to settle down in a specific place. He moves within creation as a stranger. The way to follow God is to enter the desert. To follow Christ means to be moving; the one who learns cannot be static. To seek life one must move toward it, be taken up by it. Those who believe in a political Messiah, or themselves, are dead; they cannot see the Kingdom. And those who leave the dead rise like a butterfly from the cocoon.
All the readings speak of an interior freedom which opposes the slavery of sin. Statistics show that half of high school students are addicted to pornography; it is epidemic. Every day is a battle where we can exercise our freedom to choose Christ; he’s the only one who can set us free.
